Before there was Jesse's Rainbow Coalition, there was the Boston rainbow coaliton.
But the major moment was his mayoral race. It was during the time of the electoral upsurge when a number of Black mayors were first elected to office, including Harold Washington. In Boston, a coalition of races, students, labor, women, gays and lesbians....etc came individually to work together in supporting Mel's mayoral campaign. When I saw the formation of the groups for Barack, it reminded me of all the groups who form Under the Rainbow, Women Under Rainbow, Labor Under Rainbow and so on. In fact Obama's logo is very similar to Mel's (the closest is the GLBT logo).
The Boston Globe newspaper's headline the day after the Preliminary (sort of an open primary) was a separation of ONE vote between Mel and his competitor Ray Flynn, with Mel short that one vote. The final count would put Mel on top but I was in the office the day after the Preliminary and so many people called in, particularly Black folks, pissed because they had trouble voting on Election Day. But the night of the preliminary, we were sooooo excited and pleased by the results of a Black man in Boston (with its history) coming in that close. So many people showed up at the Parker House hotel downtown Boston, there wasn’t room inside the hotel to accommodate everyone and they brought a chair out to the sidewalk so Mel could address the overflow crowd. Afterwards, a group of us still in a celebratory mood went to a bar at one of the hotels. I don’t know how Mel found us but he dropped by to thank those at this gathering.
But although Mel did not win the final election, at the "election night/victory" party we realized what we had built which tampered the disappointment of not "winning". We partied that night, and the mood of the room left one news channel reporter commenting, that maybe we didn’t know Mel had lost. What they didn’t get is that we realized what we had gain through the skills learnt, the people we met and the joy of having a candidate whom we believed in and was very much proud of.
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